This is a Golden Age for health care. But at the same time new treatments and cures are being developed, Americans are properly concerned about costs. How can the health care system continue to innovate while providing value?
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Our NewsletterIssue No. 55: ‘March-In’ to Nowhere
In recent months, an idea called “march-in rights” has gathered momentum among prominent politicians and some journalists as a panacea to what they see as high pharmaceutical prices. As an article in The Hill described it last month, “Democratic presidential candidates are threatening to take a drastic step that even the Obama Administration rejected to lower drug prices without congressional approval.” The Hill piece cited support for march-in rights from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), and Kamala Harris (D-Calif), and from South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), the chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee on health, has long been a fan, and in 2017, he led 50 House members in writing a letter to President Trump, urging him to make march-in rights easier to implement. And Washington Post business reporter Christopher Rowland began his article on the resurgent interest in march-in rights this way: “As drug prices have soared, lawmakers and patient advocates have pushed the federal government to deploy for the first time a powerful deterrent.” Drug prices actually haven’t soared, but we’ll get to that later. For now, understand that the interest in march-in rights isn’t new. It began in 2002 but soon fizzled. Now, it’s being resurrected – though the idea faces the same obstacles. First, the right to march-in because of the price of a drug does not appear to exist in the law, and, second, if the law were changed, marching-in because of price would, according to a report in March by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), “negatively impact U.S. life-sciences innovation and result in fewer new drugs.” READ MORE HERE. |
What Others Are Saying"The anger directed at the pharmaceutical and biotech industries overall is misdirected. The single biggest driving force for increased health-care spending in the U.S. is the rising cost of labor, not drugs." "Even if pharmaceutical spending were rising as a share of total health care spending, but that rise was due to pharmaceutical investments driving down expenditures in other health care areas (e.g. a reduced need for more expensive surgeries), then it would still be inaccurate to argue that pharmaceutical spending is driving overall health care inflation." |
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Cost-of-Health-Care News (CHCN) was launched on November 30, 2016, with the aim of providing news and analysis regarding a critical public-policy concern: the costs and pricing of health care. CHCN is published by EAH Strategies, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich. CHCN is supported by Pfizer.